You are here

Education Overview

The Gallery offers a wide variety of programs and teaching resources designed to help Yale and community audiences engage with the museum’s diverse collection and special exhibitions. Visitors of all ages will find opportunities to learn about, enjoy, and be inspired by art and artists of the past and present.

Education News

The Gallery draws upon a wide range of teaching staff for its educational programs. In addition to the professional educators and curators on staff, and the scholars and artists invited for special lectures and other events, Yale University undergraduate and graduate students from a wide range of departments are specially trained to lead tours for children and adults. Graduate student Wurtele Gallery Teachers lead groups from elementary through high school on interactive tours that build skills and knowledge through close looking and discussion about works of art. Undergraduate Gallery Guides offer personalized, thematic Angles on Art tours for adult visitors throughout the academic year. Both undergraduate and graduate students provide highlights tours of our collection and exhibitions.

Meet the Curator

Jessica Sack

Jessica Sack, the Jan and Frederick Mayer Senior Associate Curator of Public Education, leads the development of the Gallery’s family programs and teaching resources for K–12 teachers and students. Prior to coming to Yale, she was the senior museum educator and coordinator of teacher services at the Brooklyn Museum. She is the author of teacher resource publications such as Picturing a Nation: Teaching with American Art and Material Culture. Jessica received an M.PHIL. in Ethnology and Museum Ethnography from Oxford University and an M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University.

Sydney Skelton Simon

Sydney Skelton Simon, the Bradley Assistant Curator of Academic Affairs, is responsible for promoting, managing, and implementing the Gallery’s University-level outreach and teaching programs. She received her B.A. from Yale University in the history of art and her PH.D. from Stanford University, specializing in post–World War II American art and design. As an undergraduate at Yale, she was a Gallery Guide and a student curator of two exhibitions at the Gallery, Responding to Kahn: A Sculptural Conversation (2006–7) and What Is a Line? Drawings from the Collection (2007). Before returning to the museum as the Bradley Assistant Curator, Sydney held positions at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., and at Stanford University’s Anderson Collection and Cantor Arts Center.